Like many other messaging services, WhatsApp has shown inline photos in notifications for a long time. But with the arrival of Android 9 Pie, Google changed how things are done and introduced a proper MessagingStyle notification style with support for inline pics and stickers. In the past couple of days, WhatsApp has implemented it in the beta channel.

Now, when you receive an image over WhatsApp on an Android 9 Pie device, the notification will expand and collapse to show the picture.